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AM Class 1: Week 2 – Natural Pose

Whew! Week 2 is over and boy does time fly! This was our first real assignment and it was a ton of fun to do! The assignment was to go out in public with our sketch book and just capture as many poses as possible but to really focus on getting the “Line of Action” into our sketches. The Line of Action (LOA) is essentially a line that describes the “flow” of the drawing. If you have a strong pose with a clear LOA you will have a much more readable and clear pose. Along with having a strong LOA, we needed to remember to have a clear silhouette and that our pose shows weight and balance. All of these are extremely important fundamentals to nail in a pose. Posing, along with timing, are two of the most important aspects of animation. Having a clear and readable pose that aids in the story telling process is crucial and at AM they are very big fans of teaching strong posing.

So anyways, after getting a bunch of sketches down, we had to choose one sketch and pose our 3D character (Stu) into it, we also were told to take the sketched pose and really “push” it in 3D. So below are my initial sketches that I drew and the circled one is the sketched I ended up choosing.

Here is my 3D character posed out, this is the image I turned in for the assignment prior to any mentor feedback:
Today, I got the mentor critique and boy it was fantastic! It is so cool to see just how talented our mentors are and how having some one with so much experience can really push your shot/pose to the next level. He caught so many things that I never even saw and really explained them to me clearly about why we would make these changes. I am so happy to be at a school where I can get this amazing feedback, and it is given to use in the same way that our mentors receive feedback from their supervisors at their jobs in the major studios.

So here is some of the notes my mentor gave me:

One of the biggest reasons for making these changes, was that in my old pose, the legs and the hand by his face were detracting the viewers eye from the center of attention which was the fish. So I made a less exaggerated leg pose and made the screen left arm/hand to read more of a “disgust” pose. By having the hand facing in the direction with the palm out, it shows more of a “blocking” action which made it sell the idea more clearly.

And here is the revised character:

Until next week, hope you enjoyed! I’m already starting to work on next week’s assignments which are even more exciting!